Archive for February 24th, 2014

Places in the Internet where cybercriminals come together to buy and sell different products and services exist. Instead of creating their own attack tools from scratch, they can instead purchase what they need from peers who offer competitive prices. Like any other market, the laws of supply and demand dictate prices and feature offerings. But what’s more interesting to note is that recently, prices have been going down.

Over the years, we have been keeping tabs on major developments in the cybercriminal underground. Constant monitoring of cybercriminal activities for years has allowed us to gather intelligence to characterize the more advanced markets we have seen so far and come up with comprehensive lists of offerings in them.

The barriers to launching cybercriminal operations have greatly lessened in number. Toolkits are becoming more available and cheaper; some are even offered free of charge. Prices are lower and features are richer. Underground forums are thriving worldwide, particularly in Russia, China, and Brazil. These have become popular means to sell products and services to cybercriminals in the said countries.

Cybercriminals are also making use of the Deep Web to sell products and services outside the indexed or searchable World Wide Web, making their online “shops” harder for law enforcement to find and take down.

Our first cybercrime economy update for the year will focus on the burgeoning market for mobile malware/scam-related tools and software in China, to be released next week on March 3.

All of these developments mean that the computing public is at risk of being victimized more than ever and must completely reconsider how big a part security should play in their everyday computing behaviors. In the coming months we will dig deeper into these, and present our findings to educate users.

In these times, embracing consumerization is not only inevitable for any company; it is now, at some level, necessary. It’s become a powerful business tool, providing efficiency to the company, as well as convenience to the employees. The usage of mobile devices in corporate environments is a primary example of how enterprises apply consumerization, a practice that enterprises apply more and more each day.

With continued adoption comes challenges. The risks around mobile threats are typically focused on malicious apps, but for enterprises there are other problems. Since the devices are used to store, send, and receive corporate data, protecting them from unauthorized access is critical to the company. So how can we maintain enterprise-level security in consumer-level devices?

The risks entailed by consumerization has proven to be difficult to deal with — the complexity of managing multiple platforms, separating personal and corporate data, avoiding data leakage, and addressing privacy concerns has enterprises struggling to find the balance between convenience and security. And as the balance remains to be achieved, the risk grows. Mismanaging consumerization has proven to be costly for enterprises, as cybercriminals now see the inclusion of mobile devices in enterprise networks as an addition to their attack surface — a new vector that they can use to infiltrate.

In the past we’ve talked about a three-step plan to consumerization, which includes having a plan, identifying a set of policies to implement, and putting in the right infrastructure to apply the identified policies.

Our Trend Micro Safe Mobile Workforce is an example of the infrastructure that can be used in embracing consumerization. It is a virtual mobile infrastructure solution that aims to answer the needs of both IT managers and employees in consumerization by providing a clear infrastructure that separate corporate and personal data. It hosts the mobile operating system on centralized servers to provide a safe infrastructure whenever users need to access corporate information.

What does this mean for users? It means that their corporate mobile environment is not stored in their device, so their data remains secure even if the device gets lost. They can also access their environment from any location, without being tied to a single device. This also means that there is no limitation in terms of functionality when the employee uses the device for personal purposes.

What does this mean for IT administrators? it means that they will be able to fully manage and maintain all corporate environments connected to the network (Android and iOS) through the centralized server. And since Safe Mobile Workforce completely separates corporate and user data, administrators get to have full control of the corporate environment without worrying about privacy concerns from the employees.